china

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It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to enjoy any real gaming and by that I mean board games, miniatures games, what have you.  The most interaction I’ve had lately with anyone in the competitive sphere has been coinciding with the twentieth anniversary going on right now of the online role-playing Guild Wars… and I rarely get into that “player vs. player”.

No, I’m talking about actual games one-on-one in the physical world, where you and your opponent are looking at each other across the table and able to pick out each other’s nuances.

But gaming is still something I keep an eye on, if only to stay up to date on what the industry is up to.  And lately that has inordinately crossed over into the realm of true-life politics.  Enough so that it bears bringing up by your friend and humble blogger.

The tariffs that have recently been ...

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 Here it is if you’ve forgotten: my most serious prediction ever…

 

Make a note of this.  January the Sixth, Two Thousand and Twenty-One.  Just before 1 p.m. EST.

If I’m wrong about this I’ll eat my fedora.  No really, I will.

Here it is:

I
do declare that four years from today, the United States will be in the
WORST condition it has been in, in at least the past fifty years.

Hold me to this.  Do it.

I am dead-#@%$ serious.
 
 
 That was ten months ago.  Much less than the forty-eight I allocated to Biden.
Out of control inflation.  Soaring gas prices.  Less food.  Energy costs set to skyrocket.  A military more dedicated to being “woke” than defense readiness.  Americans still stranded in Afghanistan.  Supply chains strangled because of over-burdening regulation on truckers.  Vaccine mandates.  No effective counter to a China becoming more belligerent by
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Some are almost rubbing their hands in glee at coronavirus: holding to the notion that this is an obvious sign of the Second Coming because Pestilence is loosed upon the land. Though adherent that I aspire to be, my eyes cannot but roll in disbelief. Pandemics are almost as reliable as Old Faithful and will remain so until the end of time. The average span between worldwide outbreaks is around a hundred years. And coronavirus is hot on the centennial of the Spanish Influenza.

No, it is not the time for overzealous fervor to grasp rational thought. But with respect to my fellow Christians, coronavirus is at last the “Come to Jesus” meeting that the United States is long overdue for.

Let’s consider what must certainly be the most serious issue about what coronavirus is now teaching us. We have a woeful, immoral and almost criminal over-reliance on China for ...

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This man is hardcore. HARD-CORE, no two ways about it. MacGuyver ain’t got nuthin’ on this dude…

Hu Songwen was diagnosed with early kidney failure in 1993. A college student at the time, Hu went to a regular hospital for the next six years on a routine basis to have dialysis scrub his blood of the waste material that a healthy metabolism has no problem with passing out of the body.

But then the money ran out. And Hu could no longer afford those hospital visits.

So left with what he deemed no choice, Hu put together a homemade dialysis machine.

And his self-crafted dialysis has kept him alive for the past thirteen years!

Mail Online has plenty on the story of Hu Songwen, including a bunch more pictures and the technical details of how his machine works.

Gotta love ingenuity and initiative like that. Whenever I find ...

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There is an interesting article at the Catholic News Agency’s website about the condition of religion in present-day China. Particularly, it presents notable evidence that China will soon have a larger Christian population than any other country.

But in reading this, I am compelled to wonder if the Chinese might already have most of the world’s Christians. Maybe more than all other countries put together.

Could that be even possible?

From the article…

During a recent book launch in Rome, a noted theologian said that China will be home to the majority of the world’s Christians within the next two decades.

“Interfaith dialogue is something that China, which will have the world’s largest Christian population in 20 years, lives with every day,” said Harvey Cox during the presentation at the city’s Jesuit Gregorian University.

Cox presented the book “Catholic Engagement with World Religions: A Comprehensive Study, in dialogue with its

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Bunches of e-mails, tweets and Facebook discussions today about some downright mystifying patterns that users of Google Earth have spotted carved into the floor of the Chinese desert.

Gizmodo has been on top of this story since it first came to light and you can find pics of many more odd structures. Some readers have also pointed me toward SlashGear’s discussion of the patterns. Some of these configurations are huge: one has been measured at being approximately 18 square miles (or 29 square kilometers for our Brittish brethren and others using Metric reckoning)....

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“Armageddon” is the word that Tiger Management founder and chairman Julian Robertson says the United States faces for its economy if countries like Japan and China stop purchasing American debt.

“If the Chinese and Japanese stop buying our bonds, we could easily see [inflation] go to 15 to 20 percent,” he said. “It’s not a question of the economy. It’s a question of who will lend us the money if they don’t. Imagine us getting ourselves in a situation where we’re totally dependent on those two countries. It’s crazy.”

(snip)

“We’re in for some real rough sledding,” he said. “I really do think the recession is at least temporarily over. But we haven’t addressed so many of our problems and we are borrowing so much money that we can’t possibly pay it back, unless the Chinese and Japanese buy our bonds.”

Mash down here for more observations from Mr. Robertson...

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So the very next day when I punched in
With my big lunchbox and with help from my friends
I left that day with a lunch box full of gears
Now, I never considered myself a thief
GM wouldn’t miss just one little piece
Especially if I strung it out over several years.

— “One Piece At A Time”
Johnny Cash
(written by Wayne Kemp)

Zhang, a worker in a motorcycle factory in China, was no doubt thinking of Johnny Cash’s 1976 hit single when he embarked upon his scheme to steal a motorcycle by smuggling one part at a time home with him. “I don’t have that much money, so I came up with the idea of taking the parts home and assembling them on my own,” he said.

It took him five years but he was able to pull it off. And then he was pulled over ...

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Official policy of the United States federal government is now to refer to prostitutes as “female sex workers” (FSW) and to their pimps as “gatekeepers”.

It would almost be funny, except that $2.6 million of our tax money is being spent on teaching Chinese “female sex workers” how to “drink responsibly”.

From CNSNews.com…

U.S. Will Pay $2.6 Million to Train Chinese Prostitutes to Drink Responsibly on the Job
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
By Edwin Mora

(CNSNews.com) — The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will pay $2.6 million in U.S. tax dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job.

Dr. Xiaoming Li, the researcher conducting the program, is director of the Prevention Research Center at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit.

The grant, made last November, refers to prostitutes as “female sex workers”–or

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